He is no stranger to cross-country road trips.

Those treks are as common to Derek Owings in his profession as they would be to a truck driver.

“I can probably go for five or six hours before I need to stop, so I’m a person who likes to get to where I’m going,” Owings, James Madison’s first-year director of strength and conditioning, said.

This time, though, his destination was different and the turnaround for him to arrive was trimmed.

In September, Owings landed his first job as a head strength coach with the Dukes, so he had to leave Lubbock, Texas and his post as the associate strength coach with Texas Tech behind. It’d be a 22-hour race to Harrisonburg.

“Everybody I talked to at Texas Tech – the head strength coach, head football coach Matt Wells – was like that’s a no-brainer,” Owings said. “They told me to take that, to go be a head strength coach, go dominate that and do a good job. And then talking to [JMU coach Curt] Cignetti, knowing what his goals are to develop guys both on and off the field, because the common goal for everybody here is a national championship, my views aligned with his and this program. It was a no-brainer and I was fired up to get here.”

When Owings departed, he did so the day following the Red Raiders’ 2020 season-opening victory over Houston Baptist, and only four days prior to JMU’s first workout on the heels of a coronavirus pause that put the Dukes on hiatus from any team activities until mid-September.

Owings once had a 28-hour ride from Mercer University in Macon, Ga., where he wrapped up his playing career, to Utah State in Logan, Utah to begin his graduate assistantship under Aggies head strength coach Dave Scholz, who he’d eventually reunite with at Texas Tech. For his first gig as an assistant strength coach, Owings traded Utah State for the University of Central Florida, and needed a 36-hour and more than 2,300-mile trip, to get to Orlando, Fla. The UCF to Texas Tech trip wasn’t short either.

But none of those excursions occurred in the fall and none had happened during a span when the school Owings transitioned into was waiting for his instruction.

Owings said on his way to JMU, he made calls to the Dukes’ position coaches in order to get their scouting reports of players’ strengths, weaknesses, positives and negatives. The only member of the staff he knew previously was tight ends coach and special teams coordinator Grant Cain, who was an assistant at Mercer when Owings was playing there. Cain made Owings aware the job at JMU was opening, according to Owings.

Former Dukes strength coach Brian Phillips had left the team not long earlier.

“Having never worked with the staff from a football-coaching standpoint or a strength and conditioning standpoint,” Owings said, “it was, ‘How do we get everybody on the same page?’

“We needed to assess the players and where they were at from a running and lifting standpoint. Also, to figure out where they were at body-composition wise and then we needed to make a plan going forward for everybody to be in a good spot, so everybody could be safe from a training standpoint. Some of these guys hadn’t done anything for six months to be honest with you. So it was, ‘How do we get everybody up to speed in four or five weeks for fall ball?’ It was a very interesting transition, but I enjoyed it and obviously it went well.”

Ahead of JMU’s fall practices and in the weeks after those practices, Owings began implementing his philosophies in the weight room and on the field during running drills. He said one of the reasons why he thinks Cignetti hired him is because they have some of the same thoughts about how a strength and conditioning coach should operate and what should be prioritized.

“I’m trying to build the most explosive, violent team in America,” Owings said, “while making them as robust as possible. We’re trying to decrease injuries to maximize performance.”

Said Cignetti: “[Owings] is on the high end of the scientific curve. Our players have shown really good progress since he has been here and have fully bought into his program.”

Owings is a proponent of using GPS trackers on players to monitor their speed, acceleration, other movements, and more importantly their workloads.

Over the next year, nothing is more essential to Cignetti than for his players to be available each Saturday. The Dukes are scheduled to play eight regular-season games in the spring beginning Feb. 20 against Morehead State, and then a traditional season in the fall. If they’re as successful as they’d like to be, they’ll participate in postseasons in each campaign, which could have them on the field for as many as 28 games by next January.

Owings said he believes in position-specific training in order for players to smoothly apply anything they’ve learned during one of his workouts onto the field without any extra strain.

“We assign key performance indicators at each position,” Owings said. “How do we go about trying to improve those KPIs? For me, it’s bilateral movements, unilateral movements in the weight room and maximizing joint integrity, so we’re assessing everyone’s joints – hips, shoulders – and how we improve that range of motion to decrease injuries as much as possible.”

He said from his past experiences with Utah State, UCF and Texas Tech as well as the early feedback he’s received from the Dukes, players understand and buy into why the position-specific training is so important.

With Texas Tech, Owings specialized in training wide receivers, running backs, defensive backs, and linebackers. At UCF while working for former NFL strength coach Kurt Schmidt, Owings oversaw receivers, running backs, defensive backs, and specialists.

“So I look at the game, look at practice and I reverse engineer back to the weight room,” Owings said. “What does each position group need? I’m not going to backpedal our linebackers or our receivers, but with our defensive backs we might start our tempo runs with backpedals. Our change-of-direction drills are very specific to that position. Everything we do will reverse engineer back to that position and I think that helps players get back in the groove of practice faster, so they don’t feel as sore when we start camp because it’s movements they’ve been doing.”

Normally, strength coaches have eight or nine weeks in the summer to prepare players for preseason practice. Owings doesn’t have that luxury, but he said he is happy with what players have accomplished during workouts before and after fall practices and in the few short weeks since Christmas break leading into training camp.

JMU holds its first practice on Friday.

Owings noted wide receiver Kyndel Dean gained 12 pounds and dropped two percent of his body fat and that safety MJ Hampton gained 12 pounds and dropped three percent of his body fat. Owings said he also came away impressed with running back Percy Agyei-Obese, safety Wayne Davis, defensive end Mike Greene, cornerback Wesley McCormick, wide receiver Kris Thornton and linebacker Diamonte Tucker-Dorsey as well as quarterbacks Cole Johnson and Gage Moloney.

“Derek has a great work ethic and is highly detailed,” Cignetti said.

One other boost Owings said players are benefiting from is his stress on nutrition. He holds multiple nutrition certifications and is eager to educate JMU players about what to eat and when to eat it as a complement to their workouts.

“A lot of college athletes don’t understand how important it is,” Owings said. “Coach Schmidt, who worked in the NFL, always told me it isn’t about getting in the league, but it’s about staying in the league. And the guys who can do the nutrition, do the recovery and take care of themselves, they’re the guys that stay in the league. If you can recover at a high level, you can adapt, grow, get bigger and stronger, so we can keep adding more stimulus. And I think the big things I’ve harped on since I’ve gotten here are joint work and nutrition work.

“Everyone is going to run and everyone is going to lift. And yes, I think we have a better plan, but it’s how do we affect nutrition and fix their joints to make them as lean as possible and as injury-free as possible?”